Sounding Off

All the world's a web - and it's a real tragedy

Democracy and theatre were born at the same time in the same place, Athens two-and-a-half millennia ago. It's one of history's most thought-provoking coincidences. Every citizen attended and a prototype of democracy was invented.

Every day a programme of three tragedies tore into the deepest public and private issues of society. This all-day saga under the skies ended with a raucous, irrev erent knees-up, which pilloried gods and leaders, pretensions and beliefs. The questioning spirit of democracy infused the first drama and the first citizens' metropolis in Europe.

Today, the thread connecting theatre and democracy is almost at breaking-point. In a tightly interconnected cyber-world, our electronic Net may deal a fatal blow to theatre and all it implies. The latest digital technology is combining together with neglect, anti-theatrical prejudice and the worship of a shallow 'modernity' to shift people away from the live performance.

Last week, the Arts Council of England published a report, The Next Stage, which recognised the crisis in theatre, accepted that it has been caused by years of underfunding, and asked for £25 million - a rise of more than a third. This does make a change. It shows the Arts Council trying to become, even at the eleventh hour, the artist's friend rather than the tool of government.

Theatre people have seen the crisis coming. Last year, the Theatre Trust, the government watchdog which campaigns to save threatened theatre buildings, sounded the alarm. 'I have a dread,' wrote its director, 'that outside a few major cities we will have seen the slow death of the regional repertory system. Live professional theatre will consist of miked arena opera, two-handers in pubs, American musical imports and pantos with ageing soap stars. The West End will survive, albeit on a restricted and unadventurous scale and classified as a tourist attraction.'

So New Labour's fashionable 'creative industries' hog the spotlight, as canny London producers lure film stars to play the classics, too few regional theatres can afford enough actors to cast a Shakespeare play.

How did things get to this stage? Theatre's traditional opponents have played their part, of course. The controlling puritanism that closed a nation's theatres just a few years after Shakespeare's death underpins the outlook of much of today's political class. Its tidiness is alive and well in the unexceptional digital displays of the Millennium Dome. It is staggering that the great tent meant to house our achievements and aspirations could find no room for live theatre.

The traditional enemies of theatre have been fortified by the populist sneer, which caricatures an entire profession with the unlovely 'luvvies'. Post-modernists write off the whole theatre thing as 'elitist'. Market fundamentalists can't see why all theatre shouldn't be commercial. Decades of putting management and marketing before a democratic justification for theatre have left it bereft of a reply.

To this prejudice must now be added the disdain of the digital world, and global isation's utter lack of interest in the distinctiveness of theatre, which does not sell well across national borders. Hard-core computer 'users' do not easily become that transient community called an audience. If all the world's a web, it becomes harder for its inhabitants to catch the 'form and pressure' of the age which Hamlet exhorted the players to embody.

Two events this month pinpointed the broken contract between stage and citizen, democracy and the values of theatre. In an LSE guest lecture, Benjamin Barber, one of Bill Clinton's more critical advisers, asked 'can democracy survive globalisation?' (and concluded it couldn't). He laid bare the seductive contradictions of the 'global mall' that induces in 'users' a combination of mastery and dependency, which psychologists call infantilism. Globalisation makes us all 'kidults'.

The theatre, conversely, keeps alive our childlike imagination. Two days after Barber's lecture, I watched Tony Harrison's The Mysteries at the National Theatre. The Three Kings came in on camels made of car-tyres, wearing crowns of traffic cones. It was magic - I came away energised and elated.

When I get up from an hour at the keyboard I feel cramped and tired. Theatre may be despised and rejected by the new media, but it still has secret nourishment for us.

 Michael Kustow's theatre@risk is published by Methuen this week

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